


Chill

by greerwatson



Series: Depths of Cold [3]
Category: DC's Legends of Tomorrow (TV), The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Backstory, Gen, Race Issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-29
Updated: 2019-03-29
Packaged: 2019-12-26 11:34:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,370
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18281765
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/greerwatson/pseuds/greerwatson
Summary: When Lewis decides to remarry, there are changes in Leo's life.





	Chill

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Rivulet027](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rivulet027/gifts).



You might think, given Leo’s age, that it would be difficult for him to keep his mouth shut at school about his father’s secret night-time activities.  In fact, it came naturally.  In first grade, little kids rush home to tell their mommy everything about the schoolday.  They’ll blurt out anything to their teacher.  By fourth grade, it’s a laconic “Usual”; and no one talks about home in the playground, having better things to do there.  There were lots of things Leo didn’t know about his friends at school; and it never even occurred to him to wonder what they might be.  Nor did they bother to ask him.  Home was home and school was school.  Leo didn’t even talk quite the same in either place; and his speech was different again when he went downtown.  He didn’t know the term “code-switching”; but it came to him easily.

Occasionally, something did make him realize that other boys’ homes might run differently from his.  Idle mention in passing revealed that most of them had mothers, though some kids didn’t have a dad (or at least not one who lived with them).  It was irrelevant, since he hardly ever went into anyone else’s house and therefore never met their families; nor did he ever ask any of his friends home with him.  None of them lived on Hadley Avenue, anyway.

He did learn that Jonah’s dad sometimes thrashed him hard enough to leave marks.  This came out when the other boy, squirming a little in his seat, told their teacher—who’d ordered him to stop wriggling and sit still—that his ass hurt because his dad had given him a taste of his belt.  Mrs Stallwood simply said, “Sit still anyway, or you’ll wind up in the office.”  The office used the paddle, as all the kids knew; and Jonah strived mightily not to squirm, not wanting bruises on bruises.  That morning recess, some of the boys wanted Jonah to show them the marks; and he boasted a little about how hard his dad hit him.  At least, it sounded to Leo like boasting.  Some of the other boys, though, hung back a bit and kept silent; in fact Randy could hardly meet Jonah in the eye and looked almost a little sick.

“Does your Dad whack you?” he whispered afterwards to Leo.

“A few spanks maybe,” said Leo, “but only if I’ve been bad, you know.”  Even Grammie had given him a swat now and then if he’d been rambunctious over the furniture.  “Never his belt, or anything like that,” he added.

He knew, as all the boys somehow knew, that their parents had the right to punish them when they misbehaved, and could punish them as they chose.  If Randy’s folks didn’t believe in corporal punishment (and clearly they were not alone in that), it was their decision; but equally it was Jonah’s dad’s right to use the belt if he thought fit.  Just as, if the teacher were to decide to send Leo to the office, he might get the paddle whether he’d done it or not.  Adults sometimes listened, but often didn’t hear what they were being told.  Sometimes they explained, and sometimes they ordered; and sometimes you got in trouble for no reason you could understand.  Leo had long since learned that parents and teachers are the circumstances of a child’s life.

He had already found that another circumstance was Dad’s women friends.  Lewis often went out in the evening, usually without bothering to pay for a babysitter.  (“You ain’t a baby, are you?” he said to Leo, who denied it vigorously.)  However, he never stayed out all night.  Usually, he came back alone sometime after midnight; but sometimes Leo woke up to find a strange woman walking along the hall to the bathroom with her hair all straggly.  Sometimes they’d be up and dressed already, and in the kitchen making breakfast.  Shelley was the one he particularly resented.  She was a plump blonde, with a taste for tight pink sweaters; and she always seemed concerned about what she ate.  She lasted for a couple of weeks, and made the bathroom smell sweet and nasty with her floral soap and shampoo.

“She don’t belong,” he summed up.  “I wish she’d just go already.”

Grammie sighed.  She really didn’t have the energy to argue, not nowadays.  “It’s only natural for your father to want company,” she said.  “Do you mind so much if she takes your mother’s place?  Because, Lenny love, it’s been quite a while now since your Mom died; and—”  She broke off, seeing a puzzled look on the boy’s face.  From a child’s perspective, it had been a _long_ time since Rochelle had gone.  “Come between you and your Dad?” she said instead.

Lenny’s eyes dropped

“You have your own place in his life,” she said gently.  “You’re his son.  There’s no way Shelley can ever take that from you, don’t you worry.”

After a couple of weeks, though, Shelley stopped staying over.  There was an interim of one-night-stands; and then Lewis took up with Darlene.  She didn’t try to push Leo with a lot of questions; she used fancy shampoo but not too smelly; and she made really good brownies.  She also took a brisk broom to the floors and dusted the furniture in a way that Lewis only ever did when the social worker was due to come over.  On the whole, Leo approved.  In fact, it took just a couple of days for him to decide that she was actually as okay as any girlfriend could be.

She didn’t do much tidying down in the basement, though.  “That’s your Dad’s den,” she said to Leo.  Even so, Lewis took care to lock up his burglar tools in a way that he never had before.  Perhaps Darlene knew more than she let on about his occasional night-time absences; but perhaps she didn’t.  It was a case of least said soonest mended:  what she didn’t know, she couldn’t let on about.  Certainly, his robberies continued:  Leo knew that because sometimes Dad still took him along.  Less often, though; and never if he was going to be back after midnight.  “A growing boy needs his sleep,” said Darlene; and Lewis was canny enough not to argue that sort of point with a woman, even if Leo wasn’t her own boy.

Only one bad thing happened around that time; but Leo decided it had to just be coincidence.  There’d been a photo of his grandparents on the dresser in his bedroom; and it suddenly vanished.  When he asked, Dad seemed strangely evasive.  Certainly, Darlene couldn’t have been responsible:  it disappeared a day or two before she moved in for good.  Leo eventually put it down to maybe Dad’s breaking the frame or the glass or something and not wanting to own up.  In Leo’s experience, owning up was something adults expected kids to do; but they weren’t very good at doing it themselves.

After Darlene moved in, Dad drove Leo downtown less and less often.  There were always so many other things to do, often involving “the whole family”:  the weekly Saturday night movie; and, on Sundays, a rented paddle-boat on the river, a picnic in the country, and rides on the Ferris wheel and bumper cars in the amusement park.  In any case, in the afternoons, Leo wanted to kick a ball around in the local park with the guys from school.  Going downtown nowadays had little to do with seeing old friends:  their lives had moved on in other directions.  It was more a matter of seeing Grammie and Gramps.

Eventually, though, he realized just how long it had been since he last saw them.

“Well, with her health the way it is,” said Dad, but didn’t explain.  Still, he drove Leo there the next weekend.  Remembering Lewis’s comment, the boy gave his grandmother a keen look as he came into the apartment; but she didn’t seem to have a cold or flu, or anything like that.  She did sit down a lot, where once she’d have bustled round the kitchen; but she didn’t complain of anything in particular.  Perhaps her knees were bothering her.  She still made a good lunch.  As Lenny slurped up his soup and ate his sandwiches, he and Gramps discussed the coming baseball season.  Grammie just smiled at “her boys” and let them talk.  Afterwards, she asked Lenny to help clear the table and dry the dishes while she washed.  It all seemed quite normal.  On the way home, though, Lewis suggested to Leo that he not tell Darlene too much about his grandparents.  “Not,” he added, “that it’s a secret that I’ve taken you to see them.  It’s perfectly normal.  But they aren’t _her_ relations, after all.  I don’t imagine she’s all that interested.”

This made sense.

“You’re a good kid,” his Dad said, and took one hand off the wheel to pat his knee.  They were almost all the way home before he spoke again.  “Darlene doesn’t know your mother was coloured, Leo,” he said quietly.  “I never told her; and I don’t know how she’d react.  She’s never _said_ anything; but … I don’t know, and I don’t want to take the chance.”

“Of what?”

“Not sure.”  Lewis looked at his son.  “People make their own assumptions.  What they don’t know won’t hurt you.”

Race wasn’t something Dad talked about.  Sometimes the topic came up at school.  It belonged in Social Studies lessons about the various peoples round the world, when the teacher talked of Negroes living in Africa.  Occasionally kids in the schoolyard said some rude reference about blacks, but only in a vague way that didn’t actually refer to anyone Leo knew, let alone his grandparents.  If sometimes he felt a bit awkward in his silence, he saw similar anxious looks on the faces of some of the other boys—kids who were fair-haired, white-skinned and freckled, and had no personal stake in the matter at all.  Not one of them said anything, either.

“ _Why_ is ‘nigger’ a bad word?” he asked Dad one day.

“Because it is.”  The flat statement was not exactly informative.  “And, if I ever hear you use it, you’ll be sorry.”

In fact, it took Leo a while even to realize that “nigger” was a word for black people.  After all, there weren’t any at his school.  All the other students were white:  he assumed he was, too.  Certainly, no one had ever asked him anything he had to deny.  No one ever thought to.

Lewis and Darlene got married that fall, in a small ceremony at City Hall.  Most of her family and friends attended; but there was no one on the groom’s side but Leo.

It was after Christmas when the phone call from Gramps came.  Leo was in his bedroom upstairs, lying on the bed reading comics.  Lewis was out at a robbery.  Leo knew this perfectly well.  So did Darlene probably, at the back of her mind.  She heaved herself up to get to the phone.  “It’s your grandfather,” she said to Leo, coming awkwardly upstairs.  Her step was heavy.  She was getting kind of fat, Leo thought; but, unlike Lewis’s earlier girlfriends, she didn’t seem keen to diet.  “Your grandmother’s in hospital.”

She stopped, as he raised his head.  There was only a faint worry on his face; and she realized he either didn’t know or didn’t understand.  “It’s bad, Leo,” she said gently.  “You do know that, right?  Your Dad told you she was ill?”

After a moment, Leo nodded.  “Well, sort of,” he admitted.  “She looked all right to me, though.”

“Oh, honey, I’m sorry.”

He scrambled off the bed.  “How bad _is_ it?” he demanded.

She didn’t answer; but he could see it in her face.

“Look, your Dad’s out,” she said.  “I don’t know when he’ll be back.  But don’t worry:  I’ll call a cab and take you to the hospital.”

“No,” said Leo instantly.  He wanted to go.  (Of _course_ , he wanted to go!)  But he remembered Lewis’s admonition that Darlene was not to know his grandparents.  If she took him to the hospital, then she’d meet them; and that wasn’t supposed to happen.

She looked surprised.

“Dad’ll probably take me when he gets in,” Leo said quickly.

“Well, yeah, honey, I’m sure he will, but….”  Darlene looked at him doubtfully.  The way his grandfather had talked on the phone, it sounded as though time was short.

But Leo was firm.  And Lewis did come in, not long after twelve.  On hearing the news, he promptly put his son in the car, and drove off leaving Darlene puzzled but relieved.  They talked their way past hospital security and up to the ICU.  Grammie lay, desperately thin and faded, with a tube at her nose; but she was conscious, and could speak, albeit in a faint whisper.  Leo sat down at her side and held her hand.

Eventually, her breathing grew a little harsh and her eyes closed.  Then she blinked them open and shut a few times, and her tongue flicked out along her dry lips.  “You’re a good boy, Lenny,” she said faintly.

The men’s eyes met over the bed.  “You should get some rest, love,” said Gramps to his wife.  And Lewis said, “You look tired yourself, son.  Why don’t I take you out to the waiting room, and you can have a nap on one of the couches?”

They pressed Leo into leaving with the promise that he’d be told as soon as anything happened.  He knew what “anything” would be; and he couldn’t bear the thought of turning his back on the hospital bed and walking away.  But he was urged up from the chair, and his elbow taken; and his Dad steered him out of the room.  Feet up on the sofa (with his shoes still on, which neither Grammie nor Darlene would have allowed), he was sure he couldn’t possibly sleep—until, suddenly, he was shaken gently awake to be told the bad news.

A couple of months later, he was back in the hospital, albeit in a different ward, to meet his little sister.


End file.
